Tuesday, December 18

Living in a Cage

Myrna Loy was a movie and television actress. Her long career spans 50 years.

In
front of Venice High School, in Venice, California, there was a
concrete statue of Myrna Loy. The original statue stood tall and
beautiful, hair and dress flowing, her face and arm reaching up to the
heavens.

That was in the past. In more modern times, the statue fell to the long abuses of vandalism. Loy's arms were broken, then repaired, folded in on themselves to prevent further vandalism. An iron fence was erected around the statue to help protect it.

None
of which helped. In our modern society based on the selfish, "if it
feels good, do it" generation, the statue continued to be vandalized
until it had to be enclosed in a tighter fenced cage, completely
covering the statue.

Instead of reaching up to the sky
with grace and beauty, Loy's statue looked more like a prisoner,
huddling in on itself, afraid to reach out for fear of getting her limbs
hacked off again.

This
is a metaphor for how we ourselves are trapped in a society which
ideals have been vandalized and dashed to pieces in order to usher in a
brave new world of atheistic nihilism. With every new attack, we as a
society build higher fences, stronger bars, and enclosing cages in the
vain attempt to secure ourselves from evil.

Notice how evil still persists, yet those who desire protection are the ones trapped inside cages.

Evil
exists, yet the postmodern, deconstructionist culture will not, or can
not accept the fact. Criminals aren't treated as criminals, but as
victims, or worse, as celebrities. Compassion and feeling overwhelm
modern sentiments directing the vain attempt to blame criminal behavior
on a lack of money, or on poor education. We're told never to blame
actions, because those are only expressions of not enough government
funding, of Western imperialism, or of genetic programming.

So
those who still maintain a moral system are forced into ever-tightening
poses, fenced in, then left to gaze at the rest of the world from
inside a prison of relative safety. We react to danger, instead of
acting to prevent it.

When terrorists crashed planes
into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania
countryside, Americans reacted by creating the cage of the Patriot Act.
What was the result? We now have given our government the power and
means to enslave its society in the name of "protection."

When
a psychopath shoots a roomful of children, ideologues cry out, blaming
the instrument of death, rather than the deranged killer behind the gun.
What will be the result? We'll see another spate of executive and
legislative actions to enact gun control laws which have historically
proven to hurt the innocent more than the guilty. In response, moral
people have reacted, rather than acted, by buying more guns than ever,
in an attempt to provide protection from ever more glorified evil.

The
entertainment industry produces movies and television shows that
glorify extreme violence, immorality, teen pregnancy, single parent
families, homosexuality, and pornography, then claims no culpability
when such behavior is not only expressed, but promoted in modern
society. Moral people have no recourse but to attempt to ignore those
intrusions into their lives from every venue, and find it a nearly
impossible task to inoculate their children from such seductive ideals.
Parents who care that their children grow up in a moral society are
forced to build cages to keep out the vandals.

We, as a society, cannot long last by mimicking the depravities of the Roman Empire, then promoting them as social goods.
Yet the good and decent people of America find themselves much like the
statue of Myrna Loy, folding in on ourselves, until we are forced
inside cages, trapped and prevented from stretching our arm up to the
heavens. However, a long as the majority of good and decent people react
to evil, rather than acting to prevent it, we will continue to cringe
in fear in the cages we built ourselves.